Das Werk des Johannes Scottus Eriugena im Rahmen des Wissenschaftsverständnisses seiner Zeit. Eine Hinführung zu Periphyseon (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 253 modal theory were right, his critique of it would be to the point. But Hartmann's interpretation is often wrong, in part because it relies on a too narrow selection of texts, in part because of real ambiguities and imperfections of Aristotle's texts. Seel offers to the reader his own translations of crucial passages from Greek, although his disagreements with modern interpreters do not hinge on the point of translation as such but on interpretation of sentences and on resolution of ambiguities . His style is not dogmatic. In fact, he may perhaps too often start his paragraphs with locutions such as "If my contention is correct..., .... Should this be granted .... " and so on. However, he does this, realizing that one could try to resolve ambiguities and genuine aporiai within the Aristotelian corpus in different ways. Seel only claims to have proved that his own interpretation is "compatible with the wording of texts and that it is plausible from a systematic point of view" (xvi; cf. also 132). In my opinion he fully achieved this limited task. IVAN BOH The Ohio State University Gangolf Schrimpf. Das Werk des Johannes Scottus Eriugena im Rahmen des Wissenschaftsversti ~ndnisses seiner Zeit. Eine Hinfi~hrung zu Periphyseon. Beitr~ge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters, Neue Folge, Band 23. M~nster: Aschendorff, 1982. Pp. viii + 3o5 . 9~ DM. Johannes Scottus Eriugena, also called John the Scot, is doubtless the most popular philosophical figure of the early Middle Ages. Within the last fifteen years alone, a Society for the Promotion of Eriugenian Studies has been founded and four international colloquia have been held. New editions of Eriugena's major works have appeared in the same period. The turning point in modern critical awareness of Eriugena 's important place in the history of medieval thought was the appearance in 1933 of Ma'ieul Cappuyns's Jean Scot l~rig~ne. Sa vie, son oeuvre, sa pens~e (LouvainParis ; rpt. Brussels, 1965). In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Eriugena was viewed in a rather romantic light: living in the second half of the ninth century, A.D., at a time when the Carolingian empire seemed to be crumbling, Eriugena was seen as a shining meteor illuminating the evening sky of a barbaric time. He was a lonely genius who managed, despite his isolation and lack of philosophical equals, to rise above the dreariness of his epoch by the brilliance of his intellect. In the last fifty years, since the appearance of Cappuyns's work, a predominant theme of Eriugenian scholarship has been to undo this picture by attempting to place Eriugena in the context of his time and to understand his thought as the product and, indeed, the pinnacle of Carolingian history. Gangolf Schrimpf's study of Eriugena may well represent the most emphatic form of this thesis. He argues that Eriugena's master work, the Periphyseon, is a manual of Christian wisdom, conceived in the context of Carolingian educational reforms and designed to present a systematic approach to the truth of Sacred Scripture . For Schrimpf, Eriugena's thought progresses along a discernible path. In his 254 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY early work on the De nuptiis of Martianus Capella, which Schrimpf would see as the crucial formative influence on Eriugena, the Irish philosopher discovered the importance of the seven liberal arts, a concern which Schrimpf ties to the educational movement of the Irish colony located at Laon. Moreover, in Martianus's work Eriugena found those logical principles which he was to employ in his controversial Liber de diuina praedestinatione. According to Schrimpf, Eriugena attempted in the Periphyseon to capture a Christian understanding of the world through his bold analysis of Sacred Scripture, particularly in his treatment of Genesis ~-3 in books four and five. Schrimpf believes that Eriugena's desire to understand the world through a kind of philosophically based Biblical exegesis is the key to understanding the Periphyseon as a whole. He points to the dialectical structure of the Periphyseon as proof of the work's Carolingian educational context. The philosophical career of Eriugena is, thus, seen in Schrimpf's work as directed towards answering a Carolingian...